wep

WEP, short for Wired Equivalent Privacy, is a deprecated security protocol for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. It was designed to provide confidentiality at the link layer and to approximate the security of a wired network by encrypting data transmitted over the air using the RC4 stream cipher and a 24‑bit initialization vector (IV). WEP comes in two key lengths: 40-bit (WEP-40) and 104-bit (WEP-104), with the shorter key more widely used in early deployments.

Encryption in WEP combines a secret key with a per-packet IV to form the RC4 key stream, and appends a CRC-32 checksum for data integrity. WEP supports two authentication methods: Open System and Shared Key. In practice, WEP’s use of a small IV, static keys, and an insecure integrity check makes it vulnerable to several attacks, including IV reuse, ciphertext-only and active forgery attacks, and key recovery with modest amounts of traffic. Numerous practical tools have demonstrated the ease of breaking WEP keys, which has led to its rapid deprecation.

Standardization and replacement: WEP was part of the original 802.11 standard from 1997 and remained in use for many years. It was progressively superseded by WPA (Wi‑Fi Protected Access) in 2003–2004, which introduced the TKIP protocol and improved integrity checks, and by WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i) beginning around 2004–2009, which uses CCMP with AES for stronger security. Today, WEP is considered insecure and is typically disabled in modern networks. Some legacy devices may still support it to maintain compatibility, but its use is strongly discouraged in favor of WPA2 or WPA3.